Psychological safety beyond the team unit: the organisational fabric

Hi. I'm Tom Geraghty, and I'm the co-founder of psychsafety.com. Our mission is to make the world of work a safer, higher-performing, and more inclusive place. Today I'm going to be talking about psychological safety beyond the team unit where it's usually represented. We're going to be talking about the messy interfaces between teams and the organizational fabric of psychological safety.

First, as we're talking about psychological safety we should probably clarify what we mean by the term psychological safety. Now the term itself first emerged in the literature in the 1950s when Carl Rogers was talking about psychological safety in the context of a relationship between therapist and client and that the client had an innate sense of self-worth. Their worth wasn't dependent upon things they knew or things they did, and they felt included and safe to be candid and honest and creative. That theme of psychological safety has stayed with the term through the decades. When Amy Edunson was studying for her PhD at Harvard Business School, she had a hypothesis that high-performing teams would make fewer mistakes than low-performing teams, which sounds like a fairly legit hypothesis to have for a PhD. She went to do some research in hospitals all around Massachusetts. What the data showed so appeared to show was that high performing teams were making more mistakes than low-performing teams. Of course this didn't make sense. Of course this is where all the best discoveries come from, isn't it something seems a bit strange or you go,well, that's a bit odd. What she found was that the high-performing teams were actually talking about their mistakes and admitting their mistakes and discussing them and learning from them as a result. The low-performing teams, in not disclosing or admitting or discussing their mistakes were unable to share their learning from those mistakes. They kept making the same mistakes over and over again, and the impact of those mistakes was much greater. Through this, Amy discovered that psychological safety was one of the key foundations for high performance in a team. She came to canonicalize the definition of psychological safety as a shared belief held by members of the team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. I should clarify those interpersonal risks are things like suggesting an idea, admitting a mistake, raising a concern, or asking for help those are interpersonal risks that have some risk or consequence within that team unit within that environment. This was in 1999, now in 2007, there's a great quote in a very little-known paper by Jim Detert and Bois and they described this they use this wonderfully flowery academic phrase of the decision to speak up results from an affect-laden expectancy like calculus. That's a wonderfully academic way of saying we do a tiny little cost-benefit calculation in our head whenever we speak up. We think about the risk, the cost of saying the thing and the benefit of saying the thing and if the benefit likely outweighs the cost, then we'll speak up. We'll do the thing. We'll say the thing. We'll take the risk. But if the cost outweighs the benefit then we'll likely stay silent or at least be very guarded about what we're going to say. This is very contextual. This is very much dependent upon who's in the room and what the dynamics are in the team or the group that we're in. We use this in our work as a cost-benefit model. There's a lot of other psychological safety theories behind this like prospect theory and stuff, but we don't need to get into that right now. What we're essentially talking about here is that psychological safety is by far usually defined and described within a single group, or a single team context. That's how it's often prescribed to organizations as a way of making teams higher-performing.